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    Industry in the Wilderness: The People, the Buildings, the Machines — Heritage in Northwestern Ontario
    Industry in the Wilderness: The People, the Buildings, the Machines — Heritage in Northwestern Ontario
    Industry in the Wilderness: The People, the Buildings, the Machines — Heritage in Northwestern Ontario
    Ebook214 pages1 hour

    Industry in the Wilderness: The People, the Buildings, the Machines — Heritage in Northwestern Ontario

    By Frank Rasky

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    About this ebook

    Filled with photographs, both historic and contemporary, this engaging book looks at the industrial pioneers of northwestern Ontario, and the activities which brought them to the wilderness: surveying, railroading, lumber, gold, bush piloting, transportation, and hydro power. Rasky lets the pioneers tell their own story, through their own reminiscences, and by the monuments they have left behind. Published with the assistance of the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, and the Ontario Ministry of Northern Affairs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateJan 1, 1983
    ISBN9781459713925
    Industry in the Wilderness: The People, the Buildings, the Machines — Heritage in Northwestern Ontario
    Author

    Frank Rasky

    Well-known journalist and editor, Frank Rasky is the author of The North Pole Or Bust, The Polar Voyagers, The Taming of the Great Canadian West, and Great Canadian Disasters.

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      Book preview

      Industry in the Wilderness - Frank Rasky

      Industry in the Wilderness

      The People, the Buildings, the Machines — Heritage in Northwestern Ontario

      by Frank Rasky

      Dundurn Press Limited

      (with the assistance of the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, and the Ontario Ministry of Northern Affairs)

      Toronto and Charlottetown 1983

      Acknowledgements

      The preparation of the manuscript and the publication of this book were made possible because of generous assistance from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture, and the Ontario Ministry of Northern Affairs.

      The author wishes to thank in particular George Shaw for sharing his engineer’s knowledge about the technical aspect of industrial life in northwest Ontario.

      The publisher wishes to acknowledge as well the ongoing support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

      Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in the text (including the illustrations). The author and publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any reference or credit in subsequent editions.

      © Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Ontario, 1983

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior written permission of Dundurn Press Limited.

      Editor: Kirk Howard

      Design and production: Ron and Ron Design Photography

      Typesetting: Q Composition Incorporated

      Printing: Les Editions Marquis, Montmagny, Quebec, Canada

      Published by Dundurn Press Limited

      (P.O. Box 245, Station F,

      Toronto M4Y 2L5 Canada).

      Illustration and Photograph Acknowledgements

      Canadian National 19, 24-25, 69.

      Norman Cowan 29 (2nd.)

      Geological Survey of Canada, 15, 16, 17.

      Geraldton Public Library 108.

      Randy Haunfelder back cover, photograph of author

      Heritage Branch, Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Culture front cover, 46-47, 50 (1st & 4th), 54 (1st & 3rd), 75 (2nd), 85, 94, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106 (3rd), 107, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122 (2nd), 123 (3rd), 124 (1st).

      Dennis Christjiansen 78 (1st), 89 (1st).

      Frank Commisso 124 (3rd)

      Lake of the Woods Museum 106 (1st & 2nd)

      Lucas Photographies 91 (1st)

      Charles Macnamara 29 (1st), 30 (1st), 32 (1st), 33, 36 (2nd), 37 (1st)

      Kenneth Molson 70 (1st)

      Nipigon Museum 10-11, 20, 21 (1st), 38, 95

      Donald Nord 67 (3rd), 121, 124 (1st), 125 (1st & 3rd), back cover.

      Northern Miner 61

      Ontario Archives 50 (2nd)

      Ontario Geological Survey 23 (2nd)

      Ontario Hydro Archives 9, 78 (2nd), 82-83, 86, 87, 89 (2nd), 91 (2nd & 3rd), 92, 93

      Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources 21 (2nd), 30 (2nd), 36 (1st), 37 (2nd), 49, 67 (1st), 70 (2nd), 71, 80, 81, 109, 128

      Don Parrott. The Red Lake Gold Rush. 54 (2nd)

      Public Archives of Canada 13 (C-943), 23 (first) (C-56826)

      Red Lake Public Library 50 (3rd), 57, 59, 79

      George Shaw 75 (1st)

      Don Starratt 64-65, 67 (2nd), 73, 77

      Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society 26-27, 32 (2nd), 35 (2nd), 39, 40

      Cam Timlick 35 (1st), 122 (1st & 3rd), 123 (1st & 2nd), 125 (2nd)

      Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

      Rasky, Frank, 1923-

      Industry in the wilderness

      (Dundurn local history series; 1)

      Bibliography: p.

      ISBN 0-919670-66-0

      I. Ontario — Industries — History. I. Title.

      II. Series.

      HC117.06R37 1983       338.09713'11       C83-099038-0

      Industry in the Wilderness

      The People, the Buildings, the Machines — Heritage in Northwestern Ontario

      Ontario (shaded area indicates Northwest Ontario).

      Table of Contents

      The Setting

      The Pathfinders

      The Granite Shield, The Mammoth Pines, The Little Emperor

      The Father of Northwest Place Names

      The Duke and Dauphin of Railroad Builders

      Bushwackers and Gandy Dancers

      The Lumberjacks

      Timber Wolves or Lumber Lions?

      The Upper Canada Cossacks

      Lumber Lore

      A Sawmill

      A Paper Mill

      The Goldseekers

      The Klondike of New Ontario

      How they spent it

      Mining Lore

      A Gold Mine

      Getting Around

      They flew by the Seat of Their Pants

      Freighter Bob Starratt pushed ’em through

      Harnessing Hydro

      Hydro Power and its People in the Northwest

      Hydro’s Lady Rum-Runner and Cowboy Gun-slinger

      Hydro Lore

      A Hydro Electric Power Plant

      Monuments in the Wilderness

      Pioneers

      Where to Enjoy Your Heritage

      Recommended Reading: A select list

      The Setting

      If you’re a first-time visitor to northwest Ontario, you may be inclined to say that you see nothing but wilderness. A landscape of emptiness, scoffed one tourist. Just miles and miles of rock, river, and everlasting Christmas trees.

      His myopia was understandable. Many of us wear similar blinkers that restrict our vision. The region may appear to be a Siberia that is uncivilized and without a past. Impracticable and forbidding, Sandford Fleming, chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway, wrote with dismay in 1872 of the bush country north of Lake Superior.

      He must have been tempted, like the map-makers in the days of Christopher Columbus, to dismiss the unknown terrain with the warning, Here be dragons. Indeed, for many people primitive terror seemed to lurk in the granitic rock and jackpine jungle of Superior’s brooding north shore. A primeval fear was embodied by the Ojibway and Cree Indians in the legends of their spirit monsters, the Windigo and howling Manitou. E.J. Pratt captures its spooky presence in his epic poem Toward the Last Spike:

      On the North Shore a reptile lay asleep —

      A hybrid that the myths might have conceived,

      But not delivered as progenitor

      Of crawling, gliding things upon the earth.

      She lay snug in the folds of a huge boa

      ...

      Torpid upon a rock-and-mineral mattress.

      She was too old for death, too old for life... .

      That mythology of the forbidding forest — untamed and untenanted, inhabited only by hobgoblins of fantasy and perhaps a handful of primitive people — lingers until this very day. This book is designed to banish the dire legends and celebrate the very real achievements of the people who pushed back the wilderness. Granted, the northwest corner of Ontario that they occupy does not boast lush wheatfields and still remains sparsely settled — at last count, no more than 250,000 people, a fraction of the province’s close to nine million. It’s all the more astonishing, therefore, that this tiny populace set in a huge and uncaring land, at first glance, untouched by the Industrial Revolution, managed to create an industrial civilization. A visitor, viewing their mine headframes and castle-like pulp mills looming out of the jackpine jungle, might well be reminded of the spectacular pyramids of the ancient Mayans soaring from the Yucatan rain forests of south Mexico.

      These industrial pioneers, who paraded through the wilds of the Ontario northwest, were an extraordinary cavalcade of trail-blazers: surveyors and railroaders, bushwhackers and bush pilots, lumberjacks and timber magnates, gold hunters and their grubstakers, hydro men and pulp-and-paper men and the women who followed them.

      They were an adventurous folk and left behind a glorious heritage of industrial technology in camps and mines and mills, in trestles and bridges and dams. By using your powers of observation — and imagination — you can detect many of their evocative relics, some mouldering in ghost towns, others very much alive and in use in bustling communities.

      The following stories and illustrations illuminate the accomplishments of these people and give voice to the inanimate things that remain today as monuments to their ingenuity in the bush country. Consider this book your guide as you explore some of the marvels to be found in northwest Ontario’s great outdoors museum.

      On Long Lake, the logging industry once used this control dam and diversion channel at the south end of the lake. By 1980, the logging flume that dominates this view was discarded.

      The Pathfinders

      An 1894 photo of the Nipigon River bridge shows that the trestle has been fortified with concrete and steel. In the background, behind the CPR mail and passenger train, a boardinghouse can be glimpsed.

      The Granite Shield, The Mammoth Pines, The Little Emperor

      A big land of bedrock and bush, bigger than Britain and Canada’s Maritime provinces combined; a miner’s joy, a lumberman’s delight, and a farmer’s curse. In the simplest of industrial terms, that sums up the more than 400,000 square kilometres of land and lakes and muskeg (well over 160,000 square miles) that sprawl across northwest Ontario from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay.

      Nature has shaped the region’s economic destiny. It all squats atop the granitic jewel box called the Precambrian Shield. This means it rests on a solid foundation of North America’s oldest rocks, formed up to three billion years ago. During that period, ice sheets scooped out the more than one hundred thousand lakes that now dot the area and dumped the rich earth elsewhere. They left behind a sandy topsoil that is skimpy and acidic, devoid of fossils and too thin generally for cultivation.

      As compensation, layered throughout the naked bedrock, scoured and sandpapered over the Ice Age eons, and sometimes visible like veins of green cheese, are fine-grained volcanic outcroppings.

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